Jeff Gerke is a writing teacher, author, and publisher. Once on Facebook, he started a discussion about the writing rules out there because he was tired of seeing top-selling books that broke all the rules. It fed his latest book, The Irresistible Novel, where he argues that the only rule that can't be broken is to be sure to engage the reader.

Finally, Rachelle Gardner, a respected agent with one of the top writing blogs, just talked about the rules being tools overall. They can help when a book isn't working, but if it works to break a rule for the situation, then it's okay.

This has helped me a lot. I know that I need to listen to advice from those who have experience. But I've also gotten conflicting advice. Once I was knocked off my groove for a couple of months after some bad feedback from a writing contest. After a gut check, I realized that I needed to serve the story overall and use the rules as those tools, not as a bludgeoning hammer to force something into place.

I'm thankful for these people speaking up about the rules being more, well, guidelines to steal from a certain pirate captain. Hopefully my writing friends can be encouraged in the same way.

SO: any writing rules you've run across that have been used against your writing that really needed to be broken?

---

P.S. Did anyone notice the writing rule I broke in the first sentence?

Jason is a writer blogging at www.jasoncjoyner.com/blog
about his journey to publication, as well as social justice issues,
faith, and the occasional silliness. He's written both suspense and
superhero stories since he can't make up his mind. He's way too excited
for the Star Wars movie coming out soon.

Disclaimer

Please note that the views put forth in guest posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the views or beliefs of AuthorCulture as a whole or the AC writers individually.Material on this site is copyrighted. For permission to re-post or use posts, please contact the individual authors. For sharing a post in its entirety, please use the share buttons on the post.